Fifty Shades of Grey Trailer

Fifty Shades of Grey

When college senior Anastasia Steele steps in for her sick roommate to interview prominent businessman Christian Grey for their campus paper, little does she realize the path her life will take. Christian, as enigmatic as he is rich and powerful, finds himself strangely drawn to Ana, and she to him. Though sexually inexperienced, Ana plunges headlong into an affair -- and learns that Christian's true sexual proclivities push the boundaries of pain and pleasure.

Sara Stewart

Sheri Linden

With a loose-limbed naturalness, she conveys naiveté, intellectual curiosity and romantic yearning, and shows the unassuming Ana’s newfound thrill at being seen, however complicated the man holding her in his admiring gaze. She’s open and vulnerable but no fool. Best of all, Johnson and her director embrace Ana’s paradox: She snickers at Christian’s predilections, but they also turn her on.

Inkoo Kang

Starring a vivacious Dakota Johnson and a game Jamie Dornan, Taylor-Johnson’s erotic romance is a skillful distillation of James’ first book that captures the heady exhilaration of being someone’s fixation.

Michael Phillips

Amy Nicholson

The film strips Fifty Shades of Grey to its essentials: a confident man, an awkward girl, and a red room rimmed with leather handcuffs. From there, Taylor-Johnson rebuilds. She constructs an erotic dramedy that takes its romance seriously even as it admits that Christian Grey's very existence is absurd.

Jordan Hoffman

Johnson’s Ana squeezes believability out of one of the more silly romantic entanglements in recent popular culture. It’s all there in her face, which Taylor-Johnson frames in close-up. She’s fully aware this scenario is ridiculous, but can’t seem to turn away from its lunacy.

Justin Chang

Glossy, well cast, and a consistent hoot until it becomes a serious drag, this neo-“9½ Weeks” is above all a slick exercise in carefully brand-managed titillation — edgier than most grown-up studio fare, but otherwise a fairly mild provocation in this porn-saturated day and age.

David Ehrlich

Fifty Shades of Grey is a sex-positive but hopelessly soft-core erotic drama that fails to be even a fraction as titillating as the E.L. James books that inspired it. And yet, that’s exactly why it works.

Elizabeth Weitzman

Credit goes to director Sam Taylor-Johnson and her screenwriter, Kelly Marcel, who've stripped the first book of its biggest flaws, while still honoring its essence. And lead Dakota Johnson makes for an ideal heroine, though — as doubters feared — her chemistry with costar Jamie Dornan doesn't always sizzle.

Drew McWeeny

Steven Rea

There's real hypocrisy here. If a movie like Fifty Shades of Grey is supposed to offer a voyeuristic experience - and not a ridiculous experience - have some integrity about your nudity. Despite what the filmmakers may want to believe, there isn't a lot else going on here. Fifty Shades of Grey Matter, not so much.

Meghan Daum

Courtney Shea

Much was made about how, with respectable director Sam Taylor-Johnson at the helm, Fifty Shades was going to be a legitimately good movie. It’s not, and it’s also not over-the-top enough to suggest future cult-classic status. What it is is a movie best saved for at home viewing, both because there is no compelling reason to see it on the big screen, and mostly because the pause, rewind and fast-forward controls are sure to come in handy.

Richard Corliss

Joe Morgenstern

It’s billionaire-glossy, as much an ode to consumerism as a study in sadomasochism; intermittingly titillating, with fugitive flashes of droll; and, bondage apart, a dutifully romantic tale of an old-fashioned girl who takes a particularly roundabout route to true love.

Joe Williams

Katie Rife

Leads Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, both of whom spend the majority of the film supposedly desperately longing for each other, have so little chemistry that it gives the sexy goings-on a rather clinical feel.

Jeff Baker

The movie isn't a complete disaster -- it's got a strong performance at its core from Dakota Johnson, and it looks sleek and modern, like a Beyonce video or a Calvin Klein commercial -- but it's an unpleasant experience with a sleazy stench that sticks in a way that E.L. James' novel doesn't.

Mick LaSalle

The enormous, make-or-break things are perfectly in place, and just that is enough for a reasonably enjoyable movie. But plot problems, some comically weak dialogue, repetitious scenes and a non-ending ending keep the experience a little more earthbound than it had to be.

Kenneth Turan

Fifty Shades encourages us to buy into this credulity-straining scenario because the actors go well together (casting director Francine Maisler did the heavy lifting), Dornan's steely resolve facing off nicely against Johnson's engaging feistyness as each tries to make this cross-cultural relationship work on his or her own terms.

Tasha Robinson

Choosing to ignore any conventional sense of drama, progression, or resolution is, in its way, a memorable choice. But while Fifty Shades Of Grey is a memorable and society-shifting cultural event, it’s in no way a memorable movie.

David Edelstein

Fifty Shades of Grey is nowhere near as laughable as you might have feared (or perversely hoped for): It’s elegantly made, and Dakota Johnson is so good at navigating the heroine’s emotional zigs and zags that you want to buy into the whole cobwebbed premise.

Andrew O'Hehir

I wouldn’t say that Taylor-Johnson has made a good movie from Fifty Shades of Grey, precisely. That’s asking too much. But she and Marcel have risen to the challenge of this bizarre cultural moment with an odd and memorable film.

R. Kurt Osenlund

Peter Rainer

Essentially a Harlequin Romance with pulleys, E.L. James’s novel is not exactly “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” but the movie, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and written by Kelly Marcel takes itself so seriously that it almost cries out to be lampooned. I’m sure the “Saturday Night Live” crew is already on the case.

Eric Kohn

Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson from Kelly Marcel's screenplay, the considerable talent behind the camera and a modicum of considerable performances yield a few undeniable guilty pleasures, but most viewers will be seeking a safe word to escape this two-hour-plus mess of half-baked excess.

Josh Kupecki

It's a bondage movie without much perversion, a love story without much passion, and ultimately, a film burdened with expectations it could never fulfill. It never quite hits as hard as you want it to.

Anthony Lane

And there you have the problem with this film. It is gray with good taste — shade upon shade of muted naughtiness, daubed within the limits of the R rating. Think of it as the “Downton Abbey” of bondage, designed neither to menace nor to offend but purely to cosset the fatigued imagination. You get dirtier talk in most action movies, and more genitalia in a TED talk on Renaissance sculpture.

Bill Goodykoontz

Yes, there are sex scenes in the film, quite a few. But for a movie where people are naked for a large chunk of time and play at bondage and dominance (without ever really seeming all that committed to it), it sure is boring.

James Berardinelli

Richard Roeper

The long-awaited, highly anticipated, much-discussed film adaptation of the first segment of E L James’ inexplicably popular "Fifty Shades" trilogy is a tedious exercise in dramatic wheel-spinning that doesn’t have the courage to explore the darkest elements of the characters and doesn’t have the originality to stand on its own merits.

Roger Moore

Clinical as a classroom lecture, it’s a limp sadomasochism primer, which explains both the runaway success of the E.L. James novel and the startling pre-opening sales stats from America’s Promise Keepers belt.

A.O. Scott

Fifty Shades of Grey might not be a good movie — O.K., it’s a terrible movie — but it might nonetheless be a movie that feels good to see, whether you squirm or giggle or roll your eyes or just sit still and take your punishment.